The session opened with a working definition of managerialism as habit rather than judgement: organisations doing things because the tools and routines are there, not because the situation calls for them — the beaver building a dam at the sound of running water. Several other framings were offered alongside it: prioritising the institution’s survival and status over its purpose; an early resort to tools, techniques, and efficiency; prioritising inputs over outputs. The group was invited to argue for, against, or around all of these.
Managerialism vs leadership
Much of the hour circled a single distinction, approached from several angles:
Skills vs title.
Being called a manager is increasingly a function of pay grade and tenure rather than of possessing the underlying skill set — the EQ, structure, and judgement that the job actually requires. Professions built on seniority ladders (law was cited directly) were said to produce senior figures who are excellent practitioners but poorly equipped, or unwilling, to manage people.
Hard skills vs soft skills.
One view split management (process, procedure, “hard skills”) from leadership (motivation, trust, relationship-building, “soft skills”) — with leadership pitched as the durable skill set precisely because process-following is what AI will increasingly be able to do.
Process vs strategy.
Managerialism was repeatedly described as technique in service of order, predictability, and coordination; leadership as direction, vision, and the willingness to evaluate the external environment and choose a path. Taken too far, managerialism was said to trade judgement, speed, and ownership for process compliance.
Timescale.
A recurring axis: management as short-to-mid-term operational delivery, leadership as the multi-year “North star.” One participant’s live example was AI strategy at board level — leaders talk about AI constantly but mostly at the level of tool adoption (e.g. Copilot), rarely as a multi-year business transformation; in that domain, in practice, almost everyone present is behaving as a manager, not a leader.
Decisions and blame.
Managerialism was framed as a way of avoiding accountability — “I followed the process, so I can’t be blamed for the outcome” — versus leadership as owning a decision, including the risk of being wrong, especially under time pressure (the example given was reacting to a supplier’s sudden bankruptcy, where waiting to complete a full process would be fatal).
Where managerialism helps, and where it hinders
Managerialism is not inherently good or bad. It helps in high-risk, repeatable environments needing coordination across many functions, where interchangeability matters more than creativity. It hinders where problems are complex and need contextual judgement, where innovation depends on curiosity and dissent, and where speed matters more than structure.
Incentives and reward systems
A significant thread connected managerialism to how people are paid and evaluated. Reward systems built around clear, narrow KPIs (”carrot and stick”) work well when the task is well defined and the goal is simply to do more, faster. They work far less well against today’s less-defined, more peripheral problems, which require creativity and departure from established process — precisely what bonus-driven KPI compliance discourages. This was offered as one explanation for why leaders default to process-following and keeping metrics green.
Boards, capability, and time horizon
A live debate: has excessive pressure and pace actually pushed leadership toward more managerialism, not less? One perspective, drawn from direct experience rather than theory, was that in difficult, fast-moving periods, leaders often revert to directive, managerial behaviour rather than rising to strategic leadership, because the same pressure lands on them too. This was contrasted with the view that true leaders (as distinct from people merely occupying leadership roles) hold the wider vision precisely when times are hard — and that team composition and experience level also shape how much direction versus autonomy is appropriate.
Separately, direct board-level experience was shared describing boards that lacked operational grounding in the company’s core function — a pharmaceutical board with no supply chain expertise ahead of the industry’s later pandemic-era supply shocks; a food manufacturer’s board and executive committee that had to be trained from scratch on commodity hedging despite hedging being central to protecting margins. The point made was not that boards should be pulled into day-to-day operations, but that some baseline fluency in the company’s core operational risks (supply chain, hedging, labour) is a precondition for credible oversight — a version of “diversity of thought” distinct from demographic diversity. This was linked to a broader pattern of boards and leadership optimising for the next reporting cycle (annual for public companies, roughly 2–3 years at most) rather than a 5–10 year horizon, with private and family-owned companies tending to default to even shorter, year-to-year thinking.
Organisational life cycle
Drawing on Aswath Damodaran’s framework for company life stages, a case was made that the appropriate style of leadership is not constant: early stages call for craft- and builder-driven leadership with high ownership, while later, mature stages become about keeping output steady (”widgets off the line”). Knowing where an organisation sits in its life cycle — and adjusting behaviour accordingly — was proposed as a precondition for knowing when managerialism is the right tool and when it isn’t. Google and Boeing were cited as examples of organisations that shifted from engineering- or founder-led cultures to manager-led ones, arguably at a cost to sustained innovation; Philips’ deliberate contraction (which enabled the rise of ASML) was cited as a case of managing decline well.
Outsourced accountability
A further thread: heavy reliance on external consultants (McKinsey, Bain, BCG were named as a category) can let both management and the consultants disclaim responsibility for outcomes — “it was their recommendation” / “we only advised, management decided” — leaving no one accountable. This was linked to a broader concern that excessive managerialism can tip into organisations serving the interests of an internal group (an “oligarchy”) rather than their stated purpose, and into people occupying roles designed to satisfy process rather than create value.
Closing synthesis
The discussion converged on a shared framing offered near the end: managerialism is not good or bad in itself — it is powerful. It brings order to complex systems but can pull attention away from outcomes and into process. It tends to grow, unnoticed, in the gaps where judgement should be exercised. The practical challenge for any organisation is recognising where structure creates clarity and should be kept, and where it creates noise and should be removed — so that the system serves the people running it, rather than the reverse.
Possible future topics raised
Whack-a-mole management — whether organisations are structured to react instantly to whatever happened yesterday, at the expense of strategy and planning.
Locus of control(internal vs external) — drawing on a recent *Economist* piece — the difference between believing you can shape outcomes through your own agency versus navigating primarily in response to your environment.
Organisational and product life cycles— understanding which life-cycle stage a business, product, or capability is in, and how that should change strategy and behaviour; noted that a single company may contain multiple products or capabilities at different life-cycle stages simultaneously, competing for the same resources.
